If the shopkeeper’s a total tightarse he’ll let the stuff freeze again and try to flog it off. Some shopper’ll be in for a Kinder Surprise when they open their bag of chips, now nothing but furry ice crystals. Some kid’ll end up with ice cream that’s like candle wax.
I rip open the bag of crisps at the shop door; some of them spill on to the stairs. Let the pigeons have their share. I take a good handful of them and stuff them in my mouth so my teeth can hardly move.
Fizzy drinks taste best when the inside of your mouth is white with salt, your saliva glands clogged up.
SOUTH COAST TRACK, TASMINIA
Deadman’s Bay
Wednesday, March 2007
Heidi
The people here look like they’re half dead. Grey in the face, and they don’t talk much, can barely muster a passing, exhausted hi. One group at least asks whether it’s a long way to the water source. I point back the way we came, towards the stream, and tell them it’s about two hundred metres, Jyrki offers to show them the way; we need more water for tomorrow, too. There’s another group of six just arriving, including a couple that are clearly well past middle age. They stumble with fatigue and don’t bother looking for a suitable pitch, just shrug their rucksacks to the ground and sit down on or beside their bags to catch their breath, their faces buried in their hands, each of them plastered up to the armpits in mud and soaked through, although there hasn’t been a drop of rain all day.
On top of their boots and trouser legs they’re wearing gaiters, also coated in a thick layer of mud. We had a look at gaiters just like those at the Mountain Design store in Hobart, but Jyrki decided that they’d just be dead weight, only for people who wanted to play it safe.
All these people have crawled in here to spend the night after crossing the Ironbound Range from the opposite direction. Evening is already drawing in, and the camp’s name is beginning to seem decidedly appropriate.
Jyrki is cooking dinner, mixing a packet of tuna into some instant mashed potato. Although he scrapes the packet clean with neurotic care, he still gives it a sceptical sniff.
‘You always get flakes of fish stuck in the corners. In a few days they’ll stink, and the possums will catch the scent immediately.’
He holds out the water bottle and tells me to take the bag a distance from the camp and wash it thoroughly.
I don’t say a word; I just take it and go.
This is the second camp we’ve stayed in where you’re theoretically allowed to start a campfire. Out of curiosity I take a look at the designated campfire spot to see whether it has been stocked with dry logs or whether one of the new arrivals has already started a fire. Then it wouldn’t be our responsibility.
And anyway a plastic bag like that would burn in seconds; Jyrki would never have to know. There’s an old pad of matches in my waist bag, left over from the occasional smoke on some past holiday. Jyrki keeps the lighter for himself.
The campfire spot is a large high ring of stones. Inside it are the charred remains from the last time it was used. The exhausted campers are busying themselves further off; I can see flashes of blue and orange through the foliage. However, I lose interest in our neighbours and the fire the minute I see something sticking out from between the stones in the ring.
Paper!
Real bona fide paper!
I don’t know whether it’s been left here for people to read or to be used as kindling. Perhaps it was meant to be read; at a cursory glance I can see that it talks about the finite number of places in paradise and about lions lying languidly beside the lambs. I’m not remotely interested in the text or its content, but in the softness of the yellowish, anything-but-shiny roughness of the pulp paper.
I stuff the paper into the pockets of my camp trousers, every last sheet. Five four-paged little pamphlets, made into A4S by folding them in half twice. Oh, I have a treasure; dearer it is than gold.
I’m in such a good mood that I relent and wash out the damn tuna packet. The bonfire is the best place for the few droplets of rinsing water I’ve used. No doubt the next fire there will destroy every last atom of tuna threatening to disrupt the fine balance of the local ecosystem.
We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
NEW ZEALAND
Nelson Lakes
February 2007
Jyrki
She was panting like a little horse, white spittle collecting around the edges of her mouth. But she didn’t complain; just hauled herself up using her hands. Her hiking poles clanked against the rocks like chattering teeth as they dangled around her wrists.
Travers Saddle was the first mountain pass she’d crossed in her life.
And it was over seventeen hundred metres high. The terrain was similar to that in the Alps — every now and then we had to clamber up almost vertical rock faces — although in the Alps I’d never had to scale many slopes as challenging as these. This was no longer simply rambling; this was mountaineering.
You could just make out patches of snow at the top of the mountain.
We had a break once we got to the top; a muesli bar and some water. The views were impressive, but we could only rest for a few minutes. The eight-kilometre leg had taken us eight hours; that was reason enough not to sit about daydreaming.
The path down was nothing but a steep, loose scree. At times we were almost skating. Further down the slope the river had flooded big time. Without a decent map this path would have been all but invisible beneath all the trees that had been ripped up by their roots.
It was a hellish stretch.
And she didn’t make a peep.
When day began to turn into afternoon, I suggested that maybe we shouldn’t go to Angelus Lake but that we take the Circuit instead. The trail to Angelus was marked on the map as a particularly difficult route.
I imagined she wouldn’t be that up for something even more challenging than this quite yet.
She didn’t say anything, just gave a shake of the head and spluttered, and again she made me think of a horse — a small, stubborn pony. I wasn’t sure whether the shake of the head was a yes or a no.
Heidi
The trail to Sabine Hut wound its way through a valley, crossing some incredible bubbling gorge rivers on the way, the kinds of places that in Finland would instantly be turned into sites of national importance with local-history museums and inns serving traditional food. Crossing one of the gorges, we met a woman coming from the opposite direction. She chatted to us for a while, like everyone around here, and eventually asked us if we had any hut tickets.
What? Did she want to buy them from us? Then, to my embarrassment, I realized that she was a ranger — she had a DOC patch sewn on to the front of her Girl-Guide-brown shirt.
At West Sabine we had put four of our tickets into the box. Jyrki dug the remaining four out of his bag and showed them to the woman. In fluent English he explained that we were on our way to Speargrass Hut for the night and that from there it was only a short leap over to St Arnaud.
The woman nodded, indicated that Jyrki could put the tickets away and said something about us having a very long day ahead.
Jyrki waved his hand. I looked at him enquiringly, but his expression remained impassive. The woman bid us a good day.
Sabine Hut was located at perhaps the most beautiful spot imaginable, on the shores of Lake Rotoiti. The hut was big — it was more of a manor house — and boasted a large veranda and breathtaking views out across the lake. Reaching out into the open lake was a jetty inviting passing hikers to swim and row out into the water.
It would have been the most wonderful place in the world to spend the afternoon and the evening had it not been — like everywhere in New Zealand’s southern island near water and not a thousand metres above sea level — the sand flies’ very own Riviera.
We thought we’d seen sand flies at Upper Travers Hut
, but this was something else entirely. The air was quite literally black. They were buzzing in heaving swarms. Bites like stinging electric shocks prickled all around us, tiny black spots pushing their way into our eyes, our mouths and our nostrils.
Once we had escaped into the hut, we saw that the situation indoors wasn’t much better. Annoyingly, the door had been left open for the best part of the day. A stoical hiker sat on the upper bunk of one of the beds reading — perhaps he was a local who had developed some kind of immunity, or else he was a fakir looking for new and exciting ways to torture himself.
‘We can’t stay here,’ I said, agonized, as we stuffed our mouths with rice cakes and dried fruit without enjoying them in the least. ‘We just can’t. We’ll go crazy.’
‘It’s two o’clock. The sun won’t set for another seven hours. We could reach Speargrass in that time.’
I couldn’t help but give a smirk.
‘Well, that’s what you told the ranger.’
If Jyrki was capable of blushing, he blushed right then.
‘Are you up for it?’
Well, what do you know? The first time he’d ever asked me that question.
‘We’ve got to. There can’t be anything worse than this.’
How little I knew.
Needless to say, the trail immediately turned into a gallant incline that continued for hours and hours. On top of that it was extremely ragged and difficult to traverse — clearly it had been trodden much less than the trails we had seen during the previous days. The strangest thing was that the whole forest seemed hollow; our hiking poles sunk deep into the ground in the oddest places, and between the roots of trees we could see hollows, some the size of caves. Jyrki explained that this could have been the site of an enormous landslide and that the forest could have grown on top of the displaced soil.
Our progress was eerily slow and difficult, staggering and stumbling all the way, and we didn’t speak for hours, the only sounds being our gasping and cursing and the occasional clank of pole against rock.
And all the while the trail continued inexorably upwards — even, unforgiving. draining.
The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind,Joseph whispered in my ears.
The trek up to Travers Saddle had been a brisk, relatively demanding stroll; this, on the other hand, was nothing short of a slow, torturous death.
My hands were so sticky with sweat that my fingers stuck to one another. My shins were two lifeless logs, moving one after the other only because they could n0 longer stop.
By the time we arrived in Speargrass there was barely an hour of daylight left.
SOUTH COAST TRACK, TASMANIA
Deadman’s Bay
Thursday, March 2007
Jyrki
The next morning she seems pretty motivated, although it’s early and she should understand well enough by now that Ironbound is nasty.
You can’t set up camp halfway across it. There’s no even ground, and once you get up on the ridge there’s no water either. Out here the fixed campsites aren’t just more of the same over-the-top mollycoddling; they are, quite simply, the only places where there’s a reliable brook and enough flat ground to put up a tent.
She wants coffee instead of tea. I prefer tea. Still, we have to come to some kind of compromise, as teabags and sachets of instant coffee all have to be shared.
The smell of coffee is all-pervading; it doesn’t belong in the breaking dawn. It makes me think of the city; latte-faces sitting around outside Starbucks.
I’d set the mobile to wake us up at half past five, to give us plenty of time. Without a GPS, the alarm-clock function is the only use for a mobile phone out here. It feels odd being in a place where the air isn’t thick with signals. How do we know what kind of invisible nerve poisons they’re cunningly feeding us — odourless, tasteless but as corrosive as radioactive fall-out? Wireless technology has been developed little by little, so much so that soon it’ll meet the fate of the Megaloceros giganteus: in order to secure its survival, evolution required that the animal grow larger and larger sets of antlers until finally the entire Irish elk species collapsed under the weight of its own puffed-up majesty.
Crossing Ironbound can take up to ten hours. She says she needs the toilet. I ask her why she doesn’t just go in the bushes. She mumbles something about a number two.
I’m ready to leave. Waiting around eats away at my time and motivation.
The pit toilet is at the end of a path marked with a couple of plastic orange ribbons. She wanders off, checking her pockets on the way: making sure she’s got her paper tissues. Mine are already gone. I’ll have to remember to stock up from hers.
Now I understand why she wanted coffee. My stomach is telling me that coffee gets things moving in your gut.
Heidi
The pamphlets rustle in my pockets as I crouch down in the grass and throw up the morsel of flatbread and the cheese I’ve had for breakfast. Even as it rises up my throat, the vomit still smells of granulated coffee. The food hasn’t had time to be digested, so I kick at the dried leaves to hide the spatter of sick.
I’ve completely forgotten about going to the loo; or rather, I haven’t forgotten about it, but it’ll have to bloody wait.
The lid of the pit toilet, knocked together from some rotten planks of wood, is still open behind me; I can feel the smell in my nose and try to breathe through my mouth to stave off another gag reflex. I wipe the string of saliva dangling from the side of my mouth with a rough piece of pamphlet. I slowly stagger to my feet, trying not to look down into the pit as I throw in the piece of paper and slide the lid back on with my foot.
But I can’t help seeing down there, there in the brightening light of the Tasmanian morning.
Only a hand’s width away from the edge of the pit is a heaving mass of pure brown liquid shit. And the mass is swarming and buzzing, literally boiling, so that its surface is teeming and twirling with large fat white maggots.
I shunt the lid into place, turn and crouch down again, but there’s nothing in my stomach but yellow bile.
By the time I get back to the camp, there’s a bitter acidic taste in my mouth. Jyrki jumps to his feet from the tree trunk he’s been sitting on and glances at his watch.
I can’t tell him. I think of Conrad.
‘Men who come out here should have no entrails.’ He sealed the utterance with that smile of his, as though it had been a door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping.
Tve got to wash my hands. Will you pour?’
Jyrki nods with a sigh — more time-wasting. I can feel beads of sweat appear on my forehead when I go to look for the wombat bottle in the side pocket of my rucksack, but it’s not there.
‘Where’s the wombat bottle?’
Jyrki shrugs his shoulders. ‘I haven’t used it.’
‘You fetched the water last night.’
‘It was a deep brook. You could hold bottles under the water. I used the bigger bottles and the Platypus.’
‘So where is it then?’
I search everywhere; I look under the bushes and behind the trees. I remember that the bottle was empty when we arrived at the camp; I’d taken it out of my shorts pocket when I got changed. Where had I put it? Next to the bigger bottles in the vestibule, like I always did? I can’t remember for sure; it’s become such a routine.
‘Follow your tracks. But, hey, we haven’t got time for this. I’m more concerned that you’ve dropped it in the first place. As far as the environment is concerned, human beings are nothing but sum of their excretions, and now that bottle is just a piece of non-biodegradable rubbish in completely the wrong place — and it was left there by you.’
I can feel my eyes itching and stinging, my lower eyelids filling, I feel bad as it is. Jyrki is pouring water on to my hands from the Platypus. I rub them together long and hard, almost devo
utly, as if I were cleansing myself of what I’d seen a moment ago, and wipe my hands on my shorts. I pick up the Platypus and take a couple of long gulps of water, although I can see from Jyrki’s expression that he thinks we should have saved those few drops for when we’re on the road. I hand the bottle back to him and have a last look behind our tree-trunk seats.
‘I’ve had that bottle from the minute we arrived in Australia.’
‘A freebie given out on the plane. It would be another thing if we’d lost a lighter or an army knife. Besides, you should never become too attached to inanimate objects.’
. . .everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him — hut that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
NEW ZEALAND
Nelson Lakes, Speargrass Hut
February 2007
Jyrki
The hut at Speargrass was crammed to the rafters. After the roominess at West Sabine, and especially at Upper Travers Hut, walking into this place was like being slapped across the face with a wet towel. When I saw how crowded it was I considered putting up the tent, but there wouldn’t have been a decent pitch. The area around the hut was bobbled with clumps of grass, rough hillocks the size of your head every metre or so.